At the drive-in

Consider the drive-in.

The invention of Richard M. Hollingshead Jr. of none other than Camden, New Jersey, the first drive-in opened on Admiral Wilson Boulevard on June 6th 1933, and didn't take long for the idea to catch on in other states.

In the post war prosperity of the fifties, the drive-in became a phenomenon. With money to burn and a new found love for cars, Americans had constructed some 4,000 drive-ins across America by the 1960's. Drive-ins were "passion pits," carnivals, family outings, organized chaos.

Alas, economics played a role in the drive-in's decline starting in the 70's. Land became too costly for a small business that could only operate in warm weather and starting at dusk. The advent of cable TV and VCR's also contributed to the decline, and by 1990 the number of drive-ins across America had fallen below 1,000.

Nowadays the number of closing drive-ins has slowed considerably, with many old ones being renovated and opened under new management, such as the Delsea Drive-In in Vineland, New Jersey, the only operating drive-in in the state. I can be fiercely nostalgic even for things I am too young to have experienced the first time around, which is why I have been trying to visit as many drive-ins as possible on this trip. So far I've been to them in Texas, New Mexico and Montana. Last night I went to one in Muskegon, Michigan.

The Getty Drive-In is one of the best drive-ins I've ever been to. I pay $4 for a double feature ("The Simpsons Movie" and "Live Free or Die Hard"), and drive in to a large circle with four screens on the outer edges and a concession stand in the middle. As I walk up to the concession stand, industrial fans set into the walls blast the warm smell of cotton candy and popcorn at me. In the arcade there is the 1988 arcade game for the original Die Hard. I play several rounds but never make it very far. No matter, I'm immensely happy for the whole experience.

And the best part? It's the only drive-in I've been to that still uses the window speakers that you attach to the door of your car. Kids shriek and chase each other with glow sticks, people sit on lawn chairs and the hoods of their cars, and I lean back in Black Betty's cockpit to watch two great summer flicks.

I don't leave the drive-in until 2am, and I drive out to the shore of Lake Michigan to park for the night. I awake two hours later to a flashlight shining in my face. The flashlight is being held by a police officer.

He is extremely friendly and asks to run my license, and then he'll let me stay the rest of the night.

"Unless you're some crazy killer from New Jersey. You're not, are you?"

"Uh, no."

He runs the license and returns it through the slit in the car window a few moments later.

"Ok, you're all set. Have a good night and enjoy your time in Michigan."

"Thank you officer. I will."

Chicago, part deux

Chicago hit me the way Portland did: I completely, unexpectedly fell in love with it. I could spend weeks there going to shows, sporting events, bars, restaurants, etc. But as I keep telling myself on this roadtrip, I can't see everything. Three days will have to last me for now.

I spent those three days at Annika's place, a friend from IES Berlin '01. She was an excellent tourguide, pointing out facts and anecdotes about architecture, public spaces, neighborhoods, etc. that I never would have discovered on my own. She spoke reverentially of the demigod Richard M. Daly, who apparently has done wonders for the city during his tenure as mayor.

All told, she's probably the most sophisticated person I know.

Which is why I wish I hadn't said "see you in the funny pages" when I left this morning. I blame it on the early hour (6:30am), but really? That's the best I can come up with? Who knows if I'll ever see this girl again and that is the last thing I'll ever have said to her?

Every yin needs its yang, I suppose.

I'll close this post with two more pictures of the Windy City.

Atop the Sears Tower, tallest building in North America

Annika with our deep dish pizza at the original Pizzeria Uno (we had to wait an hour in the rain for this).

Art school for the dilettante

I went to the Art Institute of Chicago yesterday.

Try to guess the movie from the following four pictures of Seurat's "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte":

My real reason for visiting the Institute, though, was to see a specific painting: Edward Hopper's 1942 painting "Nighthawks."

The painting captures a feeling of solitude I've felt a thousand times all across the world; that even in the presence of others, loneliness can still be entrenching. Sometimes I am grateful for the solitude, other times I am not. So it's the man by himself at the counter that always gets to me. It makes me wonder what kind of solitude this man is experiencing, or if he would even consider it such.

The painting is the only one I know of that makes me wish I could talk to the painter behind it, to really find out what went through his head as he painted it.

I should mention that I don't generally visit art museums with a specific painting in mind, but rather to wander around and feel cultured. But "Nighthawks" is one the of the few paintings I know that actually speaks to me, and I was excited to finally see it.

Imagine my surprise, then, to wander the hall of American Modernism and find that my favorite painting, the one I could finally stand inches away from, the one invoked in Bill Bryson's Neither Here Nor There... was in Boston for the summer.

In its place I found this:

Bollocks.

Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind

Chicago is legendary for its theater, so I knew I had to see something while here, be it sketch comedy, improv, full length drama, etc. Fortunately Annika decided to take me to the Neo Futurists, home of Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, Chicago's longest running show still in production.

It's a show based on a gimmick, but like most gimmicks, it tends to work. Case in point: the neo futurists have been putting on this show since December 2, 1988, with no signs of slowing down anytime soon. The show is a frenetic presentation of thirty original "plays" in one hour or less, with company members berating the audience, leaping, climbing ladders, throwing candy around the room, and inviting the audience to fingerpaint on sheets of paper in the play entitled "Art Party," among other things. It's highly interactive and a seriously fun experience. Each week they take out a handful of old plays and replace them with fresh ones, creating a completely new show within a few weeks. "If you've seen the show once, you've seen it once," as they tell us.

Out of the thirty plays, some are purely random for the sake of being random, like they stumbled into the prop room of a two bit magic show and decided to see what material they could glean from the objects. Others are poignant pieces, others are silly, others aren't more than five seconds long.

In play #17, "Assault and Cupcake," the entire company assaults two audience members in the front row with water guns for a good twenty seconds, after which one actor sheepishly presents them with a cupcake.

In play #30, "It's hard to be us," two actors stand and shout in rapid fire delivery to opposite sides of the theater.


MY LIFE IS SO HARD!
MINE'S HARDER!
MINE'S HARDER THAN THE HOLOCAUST.
YOU WEREN'T ALIVE DURING THE HOLOCAUST.
THAT'S WHY MY LIFE IS HARDER.

And so on...

Before the show, one of the actors approached Annika and me and asked us our full names, resulting in my favorite play of the evening, Play #3, "This is Your Life! Brought to you by Google." An actor asked Annika to stand up as he read out facts about her that he'd found on Google, then posted her picture on the back wall where it remained for the rest of the show.

I thought it was pretty clever.

The show is recommended not just by Annika, and now me, but also by Fodors Chicago, though the company still tries hard to retain its alternative and quirky status. The stage sits behind old meandering hallways in a second story on the north side of Chicago, with beat up chairs in the lounge. To get in, one must roll a die, paying whatever number comes up plus seven.

All told, it was a perfect night of Chicago theater.

Chicago

I got an e-mail from Annika, a friend in Chicago, with the following excerpt:

"Feel free to help yourself to anything in the apartment. There's plenty of food in the fridge, so don't be polite about using anything."

I love having friends in cities.

In Nashville I walked five miles into the downtown. In Seattle I used a bus.

This is the view from Annika's apartment:


Sweet.

Last night I left the camera behind and just walked around, young and at large in an enormous city.

Milwaukee

Milwaukee did not start off well, as MapQuest let me down for the first time of this trip, perhaps due to the ungodly amount of construction on the freeways.

And then I got a parking ticket for the first time on the trip for parking overnight, even though I specifically looked for a sign banning overnight parking and found none.

I spent three nights with Kristin, a friend from IES Berlin '01-'02 who traveled with me through Scandinavia five years ago.

No, her fashion sense isn't really that bad. She's just wearing the shirt to commemorate my arrival since she got it as a joke during our time in Sweden.

One of the highlights of my time in Milwaukee was the trip to Miller Park to watch the Milwaukee Brewers play the New York Mets. The stadium was gorgeous (with a retractable roof), though our seats were so high we needed supplemental oxygen and a couple of sherpas to guide the way.

The game was back and forth for several innings until the Mets pulled ahead. In the bottom of the ninth I put on my rally hat.

That's me yelling "RALLY!" at the camera right after the Brewers hit a homerun, insisting - logically - that a rally was underway. And then the Mets went on to get three outs in a row, winning the game 12-4.

Yesterday we went to the Miller Brewing Company down in Miller Valley. It should first be noted that I don't even like Miller beer. Especially Miller Lite. Nothing irks me more than showing up at a party to see the host has splurged on two thirty racks of Miller Lite in cans. I try not to be a beer snob, but in my estimation, life is too short to drink beer out of a can.

But after seeing a regional craft brewery in St. Paul, I was interested to see how one of the largest beer producers in the United States operates. Turns out hubris is a key ingredient.

The tour starts with a movie, which in turn starts with typical inspirational music and a panning shot of a pristine Wisconsin lake at dawn. A deep voice intones, "Since the beginning, man has always longed for... Miller Time." It all goes downhill from there. The rest of the tour was also typical. "Look how great we are, using only the finest ingredients to produce the finest beer in the world," when in fact companies like Miller, Coors and Budweiser and their production of watered down swill are the reason beer lovers the world over thumb their noses at us Americans.

But then again, the tour was free, with free beer at the end, and I believe "Never turn down a free beer" should be one of the ten commandments in a beer lover's life.

Lest the reader start to assume my dedication only to lowbrow tourist attractions, I hasten to point out that we also went to the Milwaukee art museum, built just a few years ago.

But you can tell I don't have a lot to say about it, other than it boasts an impressive nineteenth century collection of German beer steins.

Leaving Minnesota

My sister Kirsten lives in the suburbs in St. Paul. Sprinklers, kids on bikes, dogs being walked, the nightly rounds of an icecream truck; pretty much everything but the white picket fences.

She lives with her boyfriend Chris in a beautiful duplex, and the two of them seem very happy, which makes me happy, because it's nice knowing my sister is happy.

But you may have guessed that middle class suburbia isn't exactly what I'm striving for, at least not at this stage of my life, and so it was also nice to put the Twin Cities behind me and get back to the open road after a five day intermission.

Not a moment too soon.

I got a text message from my friend Paul while driving through Wisconsin: "You and Black Betty ok?"

"Yeah, why?"

I had not yet heard about the I-35 bridge. I had missed it by only a few hours. I would not discover the horrible details until I reached Milwaukee that night, and so I drove on, my mind only occupied by the road.

I see a tractor trailer that doubles as a moving billboard for McDonalds. Over a picture of a Big Mac are the words "Merge at Quality and Taste." Those aren't exactly the first words that come to mind when I think of McDonalds, but hey, whatever helps you sleep at night.

I pass a billboard with a picture of a baby over the caption: "I had fingerprints seven months before I was born." There are a suprising number of similar billboards across the Plains and the Midwest.

I see signs for cheese everywhere. The classic rock radio station I'm listening to is called 92.9 the Big Cheese.

I pull off of I-94 and have dinner at an A&W stand while watching the semis roll by.

Back on the road, the Big Cheese starts playing "Free Falling" by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. The wind roars past my window. The asphalt sails underneath. I have myself a regular Jerry Maguire moment and think, not for the first time, "I could do this forever."